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Ollie Johnston died last week. He was one of the 'Nine Old Men' who helped Walt Disney establish an animation empire. Starting out on Mickey Mouse shorts, he was a member of the team that produced the studio's first feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, in 1937. On its release, this landmark picture was known as "Disney's folly", as few thought that audiences would have the stamina for a full-length cartoon. However, the film was a triumph and Johnston went on to create key sequences in such enduring favourites as Pinocchio (1940), Bambi (1942), Cinderella (1950), Mary Poppins (1965) and The Jungle Book (1967).

Each of these Disney classics has a place in cinema history for its technical innovation. However, their content was ultra-conservative, in terms of both storyline and moral theme. Yet with wartime propaganda items like Der Fuehrer's Face (1942) and Victory Through Air Power (1943), Uncle Walt demonstrated that animation could pack a political punch, and Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud tap into this potency with their study of the Islamic Revolution, Persepolis.

Based on Satrapi's four-volume series of autobiographical graphic novels, this inspired picture bears many similarities to Art Spiegelman's Maus books, not least in the deceptive simplicity of the visual style. By opting for clean shapes and a minimum of colour, Satrapi is able to make the disruption of everyday life by the imposition of strict Muslim law seem all the more drastic. Furthermore, this monochrome modesty works to advantage in the segment in which the teenage Marjane is sent to Vienna by her liberal parents to escape restrictions in Teheran and the threat of Iraqi incursion, as it emphasises how far her outspoken sense of self is out of step with the confident attitudes of her new Western classmates.

However, it is during the Iranian episodes that Persepolis proves most effective. Acknowledging the numerous faults of the Shah's tyranny, Satrapi still conveys the possibility for personal expression through Marjane's love of Bruce Lee and heavy metal music. But it's not just the prohibition of external cultural influences that Marjane resents as Ayatollah Khomeini's fundamentalism exerts its grip, as she also dislikes wearing the hijab and having her social life curtailed by bans on alcohol and the free association with boys.

There are occasional moments of untrammelled melodrama and clumsy comedy. But there is also great poignancy about incidents like Marjane receiving a swan carved out of bread by her imprisoned uncle, while her flights of fancy, including conversations with God and Karl Marx, subvert the theocratic uniformity demanded by a regime that has dimmed the spirit of her adored grandmother. Indeed, one of the film's strengths is its unflinching depiction of Marjane maturing from an eight-year-old innocent to a clued young woman, who finds coming to terms with her own physical and psychological development as difficult to deal with as the state-sanctioned chauvinism seeking to suppress her will.

Ably voiced by Chiara Mastroianni, Catherine Deneuve and Danielle Darrieux, the female characters are the heartbeat of this consistently provocative, but never proselytising treatise on the price required for freedom. Yet for all the courage and conviction of its content, Persepolis will probably be best remembered by cinéastes for the inky elegance of its Expressionist imagery.

Injustice is also the pivotal theme in Shusuke Kaneko's Death Note. Adapted from a bestselling manga that has already inspired a TV series and a computer game, this psychological thriller lacks originality, as anyone familiar with the Ringu series will see. Yet it remains an intriguing thriller, as sleuth 'L' (Ken'ichi Matsuyama) seeks to unmask the mysterious figure called Kira (Tatsuya Fujiwara), who has been claiming responsibility for the heart-attack deaths of a number of corrupt policiticans and slippery villains. However, even L doesn't know that his chief suspect, Light - the student son of a police chief - dispatches his victims by imagining their faces and writing their names in a notebook dropped by the death god, Ryuk.

With Light trying to discover L's full name so he can eliminate him and L determined to provoke Kira into betraying his true identity, this may not have the cat'n'mouse sophistication of Holmes and Moriarty or Father Brown and Flambeau, but it's still highly entertaining.

9:26am Thursday 24th April 2008

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